Easy 7-day ketogenic meal that helped me to get started with keto

I’ve got a confession to make. I used to hate cooking meals while being on a diet.

Doing all this work and getting bland, tasteless food in return? Yuck!

When I first discovered the ketogenic diet, I was mesmerized. Wait, you can eat all that tasty bacon every day and lose weight? Where do I sign up?

The important thing for me was that I started enjoying cooking again and, in the process, created this easy 7-day ketogenic diet meal plan to lose weight. It is dead simple to make, and it won’t break your bank.

The first week is all about starting out with ketogenic foods, getting your bacon on, and reaching ketosis fast!

It took me 4 days to get into ketosis with this diet plan, and let me tell you, once I got there, my food cravings and stress eating went away, my energy levels are in all-time high, and here is the cherry on top of the regular cherry on a Sunday, I started losing weight fast.

Let me start with my keto shopping list that you can use at any supermarket. I usually go to Kroger, but all of these keto friendly foods can be purchased at your local grocery store. No fancy items on the list. Just the basics to get into ketosis and minimize keto flu.

When I first went to the store to shop for keto friendly foods, I spent 2 hours going from isle to isle and reading all nutritional labels. I quickly realized that there are not that many foods out there to fit my new ketogenic diet meal plan.

I don’t want you to spend 2 hours at the store, but what I want you to do is to look at foods that you usually eat, and try to find keto friendly equivalents for your future recipes.

Ok, let’s do this…

Shopping List:

Keto Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner

1 can of minced garlic

1 pound of white mushrooms

6 avocados

1 large onion

2 zucchini

2 green peppers

1 can of grated parmesan

6 pack of boneless, skinless chicken thighs

2 pounds of ground chuck (70/30)

1 pack of bacon bites

12 large eggs

2 bags of spinach or your favorite salad mix

1 pound of bacon

low carb condiments ( Creamy Ranch, Caesar Dressing, Mayo)

coffee/tea

heavy cream

Easy Keto Snacks:

A bag of almonds. Cheaper alternatives are walnuts and peanuts.

Hot or BBQ pork rinds for crunchy cravings.

Atkins Bars for your sweet tooth.

Minimize Keto Flu:

Bottled Water

Chicken Stock Cubes (Knorr)

A 12 pack of Powerade ZERO

Besides all of that yummy food, we need some keto cooking essentials that I have been using every day. You don’t need to purchase them right away, but they helped me tremendously to reduce cooking and prep time.

Keto Cooking Essentials:

Resealable sandwich bags for lunches

Brown paper bags

12 medium sized Tupperware containers

Freezable lunch bags

Quart casserole dish

12 mason jars for salads

Crockpot for future recipes

I don’t know your weekly schedule, but I usually try to buy and prep my ketogenic diet meal plan on the same day. For me, it takes around 40 min to get my groceries. I know, I am a slow grocery shopper…

The total prep and cooking time for ketogenic meals takes me about 1.5 hours.

Can you imagine being done with cooking for the whole week under 2 hours? Now you can spend that extra 40 min per day watching Netflix or reading a book. #WINNING

Keto Cooking and Prep:

Turn on the oven to 390F, put chicken thighs in a gallon bag or a large container. Season your chicken thighs, add 3 tbsp of ranch or caesar dressing, 1 tsp of worchestire sauce, 2 tbsp of minced garlic, and mix all the content really well. Let it all sit in the fridge until the oven is ready.

The best way to cook bacon is not on a skillet but in the oven. Open up a bag of bacon that you just purchased. Make sure that your cooking sheet has rolled edges, so juices will not run off the pan. Cover a cooking sheet with aluminum foil, add as many slices of bacon as you can with minimum space in between slices.

While oven is still getting ready, put 12 eggs in a pot of water. Once the water’s boiling, use a large spoon to gently lower the eggs into the water. Lower the heat to maintain a simmer and set a timer for 12 minutes. After that, put eggs under cold until shells are cold.

When the oven is ready, It is time to put bacon and chicken thighs in the oven. Cover chicken thighs with parmesan cheese. Set the timer for 15 min. Flip bacon after 15-20 min. The chicken will be ready within an hour or so.

While chicken and bacon are cooking, let’s prepare ground beef and veggies. Season your ground beef. Steak seasoning for ground beef is my favorite. Cook seasoned beef until it is brown with no pink spots left on medium heat.

Dice onion, pepper, zucchini, and mushrooms. Add 1 tbsp of real butter on a hot skillet, add diced onion and mushrooms. Cook it until it is goldish brown color, add zucchini, pepper, and 1 tbsp of garlic. For seasoning, I use garlic salt, but you can experiment with your veggie mix. Mixed it all up and let it simmer for 15-20 min.

After veggies and ground beef are ready, mix them all together.

Get the bacon and chicken out of the oven when it is ready. Let it cool for 15-20 minutes. Dry bacon with a paper towel from extra grease.

Minimizing Keto Flu

I remember my experience with keto flu. It hit me like a ton of bricks. I had full-blown, flu-like symptoms.

It wasn’t pretty, but it doesn’t mean that it will happen to you. Symptoms vary from person to person. One of my friends didn’t even have any symptoms.

Nonetheless, there are techniques to minimize the severity of ketogenic flu, especially during your first week of your ketogenic diet journey.

The main reason for keto flu symptoms is electrolytes imbalance. To minimize these symptoms I recommend to ramp up on your sodium intake. There is actually a very easy way of doing it. Just boil up a cup of water in a microwave, throw a Knorr cube, and you have a tasty cup of soup with 68% of daily sodium value.

If you want something sweeter and cooler, then blue Powerade ZERO is your friend. Also, I am a big fan of sunflower seeds. It takes a long time to eat a lot of them and it has enormous amounts of sodium. Double Win!!!

Last, but not least, don’t forget to stay hydrated and drink plenty of water. The rule of thumb is to do “8×8” (8 cups of 8oz). I think it is too many cups to track. I would recommend investing in 32oz bottle of water and just having two of those daily.

Conclusion

This week is all about starting with the ketogenic diet meal plan and trying to get into ketosis. You have 6 breakfasts, 6 lunches, and 6 dinners. I left one day out intentionally, so you can start finding recipes that you like. This week try to keep up with you electrolytes and water intake to minimize keto flu.